Zappa Records

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Zappa Records is an American music label that the composer and rock musician Frank Zappa founded in Los Angeles in 1977. Only a few singles and LPs by Frank Zappas as well as a single and an album by L. Shankar were released on the label in 1979 and 1980 . In the mid-1990s, the Zappa sons released albums from their group "Z". In 2006 the label was used again by the Zappa Family Trust for publications from the Zappa estate.

history

Zappa Records got off to a bad start. Originally, the new label should have made its debut with the four-LP box Läther on October 31, 1977, Halloween day. 300 LP boxes had already been made when Zappa's distribution partner Warner Bros. Records stopped the project. Warner objected because there was material on Läther that partially coincided with the Warner album Zappa in New York for release . Sales in the USA and Canada were taken over by Mercury / Phonogram ; outside North America, CBS was responsible for the Zappa albums and Mercury / Phonogram for the albums of other artists on the label. (P. 313)

After the originally planned start of the label, about a year and a half passed until a first album was released on Zappa Records in March 1979: Sheik Yerbouti , some of whose songs were recorded on a four-track recorder. It became a great success for Zappa, as after the 1974 album Apostrophe (') it was the album with the second highest hit parade rating, which rose to number 21 in the US charts and tenth in Germany. The single "Bobby Brown", which was released, proved to be particularly successful: In 1980 it reached fourth place in Germany and fifth in Switzerland; Republished as "Bobby Brown Goes Down", the song made it into the charts again eleven years later and climbed to second place in Austria. In the United States, the single "Dancin 'Fool", which was also released, reached number 45. In addition, the album Zappa earned its first two Grammy nominations, which were ultimately unsuccessful: for the track "Dancing Fool" in the "Best Rock Vocal Performance - male "and for the guitar piece" Rat Tomago "in the category" Best Rock Instrument Performance ".

In the meantime, Zappa had hired the Indian violinist L. Shankar for the label. The result of this collaboration was the album Touch Me There . Zappa co-wrote four pieces and also appeared as a singer with Ike Willis on the song "Dead Girls of London" .

Joe's Garage was designed as a Broadway musical, but Zappa abandoned his original idea. So appeared Joe's Garage Act I as a simple LP, the fact the double album after one month, the single release "Joe's Garage" / "Central Scrutinizer" and two months Joe's Garage Act II & III followed. These albums were also a commercial success and reached places in or just under the top 40 in the USA and Germany and in the top 10 in Austria.

For a long time the last release on Zappa Records was the single "I Don't Wanna Get Drafted" with "Ancient Armaments" on the back, which came out at the end of April 1980 and is in the US charts at number 103, in Germany 71 could place.

After that, the label didn't release any records for 15 years. In 1995 and 1996 two albums by "Z", the group of Zappa's sons Ahmet and Dweezil Zappa , were released with the participation of former Zappa musician Mike Keneally . Another ten years passed before the Zappa family released three albums from the Zappa estate in quick succession in 2006. (P. 322) (p. 91f)

In 2012 the term "Zappa Records" was the subject of extensive discussions in a ruling by the Federal Court of Justice. The Zappa Trust had sued the operators of the Zappanale for infringement of the registered community trademark "Zappa". His main argument was that the Zappa brand had also been used in the community through the use of the name "Zappa records". Both the BGH and the lower court (OLG Düsseldorf) opposed this. In response to the Zappanale operator's counterclaim, the BGH ruled that the term Zappa does not enjoy trademark protection in Germany either because it was not used as a trademark after it was registered.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Barry Miles : Zappa . German edition. Rogner & Bernhard at two thousand and one. 2005. ISBN 3-8077-1010-8 .
  2. ↑ Grammy nomination (as of April 2007)
  3. ↑ Album Touch me There (April 2007)
  4. ^ Carl-Ludwig Reichert: Frank Zappa . DTV, Munich, 2000. ISBN 3-423-31039-1
  5. ↑ [1] (PDF; 405 kB) BGH judgment of May 31, 2012, Az. I ZR 135/10